


Homesick

by cirque



Category: Starship Troopers (1997)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/pseuds/cirque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An elderly Rico reflects upon his life. </p><p>/ angst, war, & slightly gory bugs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homesick

Johnny writes to Carmen every two weeks for most of his life. She responds sporadically, decreasingly interested in his exploration of the universe; she tells him of Brad and the kids, she feeds him details through the monochrome screen of his comms device. It occurs to him that somewhere between school and war, he missed out on a life. Be it Planet P or Earth, wherever he stamps his feet, somewhere along the way the world went and grew up, and Johnny Rico is left biting the dust, stuck commanding his squadron of kids year after year. They infuriate him with their fleeting ambitions and their ugly happiness; he wants to tell them about the glut of war, about finding the brain bug, about Dizzy.

He visits Carl whenever he can. Carl lives in Tokyo when he isn't travelling the trans-galactic highway in ultra-style; his house is beautiful and bespoke, and makes Johnny feel like a coward. There are Romanesque columns and a shallow little reflecting pool full of lithe goldfish. Carl never married, which makes Johnny feel a little better about himself, but he shares his house with a young apprentice he took on a few years ago; there's a certain depth to their relationship which suggests to Johnny that he never really new Carl, not really. They walk through the painted atrium, talking of little things, Carl being his usual distanced self, and Johnny often wonders why they stayed in contact all these years, but perhaps it's the comfort of childhood he needs most.

He sees Ace when neither of them is too busy; Ace married a stocky young ammunitions technician one summer and grew up in the blink of an eye. He retired quietly at the end of a particularly tough campaign and swapped weapons for kids in the dusty peace of his midwest mansion. His work as a writer keeps him busy, he types up news reports for an archive project in Geneva, cataloguing the end of a generation of war.

Johnny remembers those first few weeks in the infantry, the hot spray of war a constant ringing in their ears, the pinch of excitement in their stomachs; they strode over worlds, invaded burning planets, and fell in love by torchlight. Ace refers to the war as his "wild teenage years"; he is nothing like the brash youth Johnny remembers, and everything has been reduced to just another phase he went through. He wonders how often Ace thinks of Dizzy, or if he does at all, but he can't muster the bravado to bring it up. Even Ace knows that poor old Captain Rico still burns a candle for the one that got away.

Now that the war is drawing to a slow but determined end, men like Johnny Rico are becoming a laughable commodity. The majority of bugs are dead, or in hiding, and war generals, though respected, are being defamed in the media for their actions in those first few years of war; the world is slowly becoming politically correct. Johnny, near retirement, is tired of war and bugs and fighting to the goddamned death; he's wondering where the next big propaganda drive will come from.

When Buenos Aires got rebuilt some years after the destruction, a marble memorial was constructed among a smattering of modern houses - it is here that Johnny lives, when he isn't on rotation with his squad, picking out a life with the doves and the street dogs. He keeps a gun in a vault in the kitchen, and has his old Mobile Infantry uniform in the closet to admire on Memorial Days as the Sky Marshal's speech loops on the comn screen. Although he didn't expect her to be a regular guest, he is hurt that Carmen has never once come home. She chalks it up to Brad and the kids, and her travelling nature, but Johnny is scornful of the boat she calls home; he wonders what she's running from now that everyone is dead.

He's tried to deny it enough times over the years, but he'd have married her if he thought she'd say yes. He'd do anything to keep a hold of the way things used to be, back when he could only imagine what it felt like to shoot a gun. He pretends that they'd get a dog and have a few pretty children; he'd always wanted to have a life with her. He'd have given up the Infantry for her, but it was for Dizzy that he was compelled to keep fighting, keep shooting skyward.

He started walking with a limp after a close encounter with a tanker bug, and now on the darker side of fifty he reminds himself somewhat of Rasczak, all hunkered against the world with an ingrown frown. In light of this, he wonders what will become of his body when he dies. He wants a space burial because his rank commands it and because he likes the glory of it, but he supposes it'll fall to Ace or someone to order a quiet and private internment somewhere. He has no family to speak of, only his Mobile Infantry kids who think him infallible and immortal.

When Carmen's son joins up, Johnny is there beside the drill sergeant watching the boy be broken in. He has Carmen's dark good looks and lofty intelligence, he has a quick mind and no head for delinquency; he's a strong soldier and works hard, but Johnny can tell he has inherited his mother's distanced view of war - like Johnny, he has joined because citizenship is his dream. He falls in with a rowdy group of friends and Johnny finds himself picking out the Ace and Kitten of their group with quiet pride; there is even a girl who is as brazen as Dizzy. Almost.

On the comm link to Carmen, he tells her he'll watch over her boy. He reassures her that war is in the past now, only a few officers are on the frontlines, and Johnny and his kids are in the reserves now, training for a battle that will never come. The kids bicker among themselves, get into fistfights and have that lack of respect for authority that Johnny used to pride himself on. He wonders what world they'll grow up into, what kind of old age they will have without a war to mark the end of their childhood. He's a cynic, and well aware.

He thinks of Dizzy more often than he ought to. He put her in the back of his mind as he lived his life, but when the world began to slow down, he took to thinking about her more. He bodily misses her companionship, and craves most of all that she was there to talk to. She had a way of talking that Johnny found comforted him somewhat; her grim outlook was akin to his own. He is homesick for her, especially so towards the end of his life.

He remembers with painful clarity that day in high school before war began, when their jumpball team made the semi-finals and the whole team had been alive with excitement, and Dizzy was beautiful in her brittle youth, and he had turned away from her to kiss Carmen, who never really liked him anyway.

 


End file.
